Was the Ambassador Class phased out?

Having watched the Dominion War battle scene again recently, I was sorry we never saw a single Ambassador retaking DS9 or fighting at Chin'Toka. You'd think they'd be at least as common as the numerous Galaxies we saw.

I realize it comes down to which ships got a CG version and which didn't (Between the Defiant, Excelsior, Miranda, Galaxy, and inexplicably rare Nebula, plus the CG ships designed for "First Contact", I guess they thought they had enough), and I could see the Constellations being considered old and possibly phased out, and the small, fragile Oberths being considered unsuitable for combat, but the Ambassador would've been nice to see as well.

The last on-screen appearance of the ship was the Wolf 359 scenes in "Emissary", but the last chronological appearance was in TNG's 5th season. It's possible the class was phased out, or that not that many were ever made in the first place, but still...

As I stated in another thread, the prevailing fandom explanation is that the Ambassador class was built primarily for deep-space exploration, and the reason why we never saw any was because they were all very far away. Of course, there's not a shred of canonical evidence to validate this theory.

^I can see that being the reason why more specific mission-ships weren't seen during the Dominion war (kinda like how the USS Titan wasn't recalled during the Borg invasion in the novels), but the Ambassador class was supposed to be the Starfleet's mightiest and was just one generation behind the Galaxy class.

Maybe the Ambassadors were all just assigned to offscreen fleets - probably along with all the Niagra, Chyenne, Intrepid and Sovereign class ships.

...Why do people say "Niagra"? The third "a" isn't missing from the pennants or the reference book entries, now is it?

There are real-world examples of certain ship types being exclusively used in certain theaters of war, so I have no major problem with that. What I find a bit odd is that the fleets operating near DS9 featured such a broad range of ships... The ones from the Galaxy generation ought to have been faster than the older ones, and must have felt incredibly frustrated and misused when forced to crawl at a fleet speed dictated by those Miranda relics and the oddball low-performance Defiants. Pairing capital ships from the in-between generations with the Miranda stock (that is, Ambassadors!) would have made better strategic sense.

Maybe they just never built very many to start with. Therefor you don't see them for the same reason you don't see the newly created Sovereign Class, at the time of the Dominion War there are only two or three of them.

How many Ambasadors were ever seen? The Zhukov and the Excaliber come to mind, and the Horatio was supposedly Ambassador-class, too. Any others? Excluding, of course, the Enterprise-C, as it was definitely destroyed long before the Dominion War.

Apart from those mentioned, only the more or less unnamed one from DS9 "Emissary", identified by backstage means as having been labeled the Yamaguchi, was seen on screen.

In TNG "Second Chances", the show-and-tell Okudagram describing the duplication of Will Riker featured an Ambassador class silhouette to describe USS Potemkin, Will's old ship, but backstage sources have traditionally identified that ship as an Excelsior, as per the one and only onscreen appearance of a ship of that name in TNG, in "Ethics".

That is, we saw the Excelsior class vessel that had apparently ferried Dr. Russell to the hero ship for the adventure of the week, and Russell said she had some gear aboard the Potemkin, suggesting this was the name of the ferry vessel - but of course the ship we saw had no name or registry visible, and in theory Russell might have been expecting some of her equipment to arrive on a later ship. Or something.

Certainly it would also be possible that there were two ships of that name in the 2360s, and the Ambassador class one was lost at some point and replaced by an Excelsior. Both classes might have remained in production, and canonically we never quite saw the registry of either vessel so we can't derive chronological ques from that, either. (There are some blurry onscreen Okudagrams with various registry options, though.)

It might be that some of those older Miranda etc... ships, were older ships that werer in mothballs (fleet reserves etc..) and reactivated to boolster the fleet.

Click to expand...

Someone else on Youtube suggested the same thing, but I'm skeptical of that, simply because of the sheer number of Mirandas we saw.

I tend to see the Miranda, like the Excelsior, as a multipurpose design that was used for such varied uses as surveying already-charted planets for things like colonization or mining (Reliant), science vessels (Brattain) or a supply ship (Lantree). Most of them would've been pulled away from these duties and sent to join fleets at the start of the war.

Maybe they just never built very many to start with. Therefor you don't see them for the same reason you don't see the newly created Sovereign Class, at the time of the Dominion War there are only two or three of them.

Click to expand...

The absence of Sovereigns never bothered me, in the real-world sense that they might not want to show hero ships from other shows/movies. (We also never saw another Intrepid other than the Bellerophon)

I'm curious what exactly the cost (both in money and time) of creating a CG version of existing ship designs was.

Well I said some, but given the sheer size of the Federation. It would seem likely that newer designs operated on the frontier, whilst older designs were relegated to milk runs so too speak.

Click to expand...

True, although I would imagine exploration took a rather low priority in the midst of war, especially war with such a formidable enemy. Hence the numerous Galaxy class (an obvious choice for deep space explorers) being assigned to fleets.

No. The only Sovereign ever seen was the big "E" and that was only seen in the three movies.

Real world reason is probably that a "hero" ship like that (which is larger than most other Starfleet ships) would stand out in fleets, rather than blending in, the way that Excelsiors, Mirandas, Nebulae, and even Galaxies do. You can't have some guest ship upstaging the Defiant!

Yes. I believe the DS9 people wanted to have one in the background or even on special occasions, but the execs wanted to keep her for the movie outings. Frankly I think it would've been just fine to see the Big-E in a shot or two, sorta like seeing the USS Galaxy in action at Chin'toka. It WOULD seem a little wierd to have Picard in a fleet commanded by Sisko, but it's not as though the hierarchy of the big fleet battles made that much sense to begin with IMO, beyond cool-lookingness.

I agree that there probably weren't that many Ambassadors built to begin with, being supposedly akin to the Galaxy's initial rareness as Starfleet's premier explorer. However, where the Galaxy may have seen increased production beyond the six that were initially planned (per Sternbach et. al.), the Ambassador may have been kept to small production runs and also to their intended duty of being deep space explorers.

I like to imagine maybe two dozen of the class being constructed in two batches (NCC-10xxx and NCC-26XXX ish, going by known registries) and spending the vast majority of their times on the periphery of Federation space and beyond. When the war rolled around, Starfleet may have recalled those Explorers within a year's travel time of the conflict, but otherwise left the guys further out on their own, perhaps at best telling them not to go out further on their planned courses into deeper space just in case they needed to be brought back. We know that Starfleet had ships up to thirty years travel time beyond Federation space (VOY "Lifeline"), and one or more of them may have been an Ambassador-class ship, tooling along and waving the flag to anyone who may want to come conquering. :P

Maybe they just never built very many to start with. Therefor you don't see them for the same reason you don't see the newly created Sovereign Class, at the time of the Dominion War there are only two or three of them.

Click to expand...

This is what I mentioned on another topic. If only 6-12 were ever built (like Galaxies and Constitution), and few like Enterprise and Horatio destroyed, you woudn't have many around. When Dominion War came, they would have tried to complete Galaxies that already had frameworks built and in storage rather than go with building Amabassadors from scratch.